Online Shopping History:
History
Since about 1990, online shopping has emerged into every corner of life, linking people to the culture of capitalism in frequent and daily ways.
It lets us buy what we want, when we want at our convenience , and helps us to imagine ourselves buying, owning, and having positive outcomes by the
goods available out there on the web. Shopping has been a way of identifying oneself in today's culture by what we purchase and how we use our purchases.
Online shopping has always been a middle to high class commodity since its first arrival on the internet in society. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created
The World Wide Web Browser. A few years later in 1994 other advances took place such as Online Banking, After that, the next big development
was the opening of an online pizza shop by Pizza Hut. In that same year Netscape introduced SSL encryption to enable encryption over the
data transfered online which has become essential for online shopping. In 1995, Amazon started up with online shopping, then in 1996, eBay
opened up for online shopping as well. The idea of online shopping pre-dates the World Wide Web for there were earlier experiments
involving real-time transaction processing from a domestic television. The technology, based on Videotex, was first demonstrated by Michael
Aldrich in 1979 who designed and installed systems in the UK, including the first Tesco pilot system in the 1980s.
Customers:
In general, shopping has always catered to middle class and upper class women. Shopping is fragmented and pyramid-shaped. At the pinnacle are elegant
boutiques for the affluent, a huge belt of inelegant but ruthlessly efficient “discounters” flog plenty at the pyramid’s precarious middle.
According to the anaylsis of Susan D. Davis, at its base are the world’s workers and poor, on whose cheapened labor the rest of the pyramid
depends for its incredible abundance.[1]. Shopping has evolved from single stores to large malls with different services such as offering delivery,
attentive service and store credit and accepting return. These new additions to shopping have encouraged and targeted middle class women.
In recent years, online shopping has become popular; however, it still caters to the middle and upper class. In order to shop online, one must be able
to have access to a computer, a bank account and a debit card. Shopping has evolved with the growth of technology. According to research found in
the Journal of Electronic Commerce, if we focus on the demographic characteristics of the in-home shopper, in general, the higher the level of
education, income, and occupation of the head of the household, the more favourable the perception of non-store shopping. It should be
remembered that an influential factor in consumer attitude towards non-store shopping is exposure to technology, since it has been demonstrated that
increased exposure to technology increases the probability of developing favourable attitudes towards new shopping channels.
Online shopping widened the target audience to men and women of the middle class. At first, main users of online shopping were young men with a high level of income and a university education. [4]. This profile is changing. For example, in USA in the early years of Internet there were very few women users, but by 2001 women were 52.8% of the online population. [4]. Sociocultural pressure has made men generally more independent in their purchase decisions, while women place greater value on personal contact and social relations. [4]. In addition, male shoppers are more independent when deciding on purchasing products because unlike women, they don’t necessarily need to see or try on the product.
Trends:
One third of people that shop online use a search engine to find what they are looking for and about one fourth of people find websites by word of mouth.
Word of mouth has increased as a leading way that people find websites to shop from. When an online shopper has a good first experience with a certain
website sixty percent of the time they will return to that website to buy more.
Books are one of the things bought most online, however clothes, shoes and accessories are all very popular things to buy online. Cosmetics,
nutrition products and groceries are increasingly being purchased online. About one fourth of travelers are buying their plane tickets online
because it is a quick and easy way to compare airline travel and make a purchase. Online shopping provides more freedom and control than
shopping in a store.
According to sociological perspective online shopping is arguably the most predictable way to shop. One knows exactly what website to go to,
how much the product will cost, and how long it will take for the product to reach them. Online shopping has become extremely routine
and predictable, which is one of it’s great appeals to the consumer.
Shopping cart systems:
Simple systems allow the offline administration of products and categories. The shop is then generated as HTML files and graphics that
can be uploaded to a webspace. These systems do not use an online database.
A high end solution can be bought or rented as a standalone program or as an addition to an enterprise resource planning program. It
is usually installed on the company's own webserver and may integrate into the existing supply chain so that ordering, payment, delivery,
accounting and warehousing can be automated to a large extent.
Other solutions allow the user to register and create an online shop on a portal that hosts multiple shops at the same time.
open source shopping cart packages include advanced platforms such as Interchange, and off the shelf solutions as osCommerce, Magento,
Zen Cart and VirtueMart.
Commercial systems can also be tailored to ones needs so that the shop does not have to be created from scratch. By using a framework
already existing, software modules for different functionalities required by a webshop can be adapted and combined.
User interface:
It is important to take the country and customers into account. For example, in Japan privacy is very important and emotional involvement is more
important on a pension’s site then on a shopping site. Next to that, there is a difference in experience: experienced users focus more on the
variables that directly influence the task, while novice users are focusing more on understanding the information.
There are several techniques for the inspection of the usability. The ones used in the research of Chen & Macredie (2005) are Heuristic evaluation,
cognitive walkthrough and the user testing. Every technique has its own (dis-)advantages and it is therefore important to check per
situation which technique is appropriate.
When the customers visited the online shop, a couple of factors determine whether they will return to the site. The most important factors are the ease
of use and the presence of user-friendly features.
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